Solar Storm Rendering | Hacker News Reader

Solar Storm Rendering

jakubtomsu.github.io

47 pointsibobev9 comments

The game looks super cool, I wanted to make a similar kind of game as a kid but went off on a ray tracing adventure instead...

One thing about the rendering, it seems to almost completely lack antialiasing; I'm not sure if this is because of higher dpi displays and worse eyesight becoming more common, but it's a big omission IMO.

Yeah you're right, there isn't really any anti-aliasing in the world-space pass. I made sure the text and UI have AA since that would be really bad without it. But the tanks and the terrain don't have it, because it looks weird after the palettization happens. The outlines could also be tweaked to have AA on the "inner" side, however that makes things look pretty blurry... I might look into it again, but I feel like it's not _that_ much of an issue on modern highres displays

Reminds me of a game that I played on Apple II a very long time ago. Can't remember the name but, it was a very basic two player shoot artillery at each other game and I loved it.

Scortched Earth maybe? Also Worms vibe.

Love seeing a project's profiler trace like the one in the conclusion. It feels honest. There's no magic here, just understanding.

Thank you! I also included the GPU trace from PIX just now, for the sake of completeness

Very interesting stack: Odin and Sokol - both are on my radar.

I know that Sokol has WASM builds, but AFAIK Odin does not support it.

Could you say more about your choice both for the language and for Sokol.

For me Sokol seems to be a winner according to my preferences: minimal and widely cross-platform.

Odin seems to be more tailor made for gaming, which must be a general advantage for such a project. Odin is often grouped with Zig, but the latter seems to be more generic for example. I am interested in both projects, though inclined more towards Zig. I imagine if I would be more active with gamedev again I would pick Odin first.

Odin supports WASM and some people use it for games and other apps. For example Spall (https://gravitymoth.com/spall/spall.html) is written 100% in Odin and runs in the browser.

Sokol is very nice indeed. I love it because it's so minimal, but it has all the features I need at the same time. Andre Weissflog (the author of Sokol) really knows what he's doing. I've written engines completely from scratch before, and also used high-level libraries like Raylib. IMO Sokol has something from both worlds. The "build your own engine on top" style really fits my style of making games

I think both Odin and Zig are good languages. But Zig is _far_ more complicated and ambitious project, and it's nowhere near finished. Odin on the other hand hasn't changed almost at all in the last 2-3 years, and the 1.0 is just a matter of polishing the compiler and writing an official spec.

Odin does everything I need from a C-like language really well, I don't think I'm going to switch to another language in the next couple years. But you're right it's more suited towards gamedev and graphics programming. If I was more worried about safety I might choose Zig...

Nice work, looks beautiful and fun

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